


All The Parts And None Of The Whole

by commoncomitatus



Series: Colour And Light [1]
Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Beginnings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 02:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18769762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Monkey stepped out of the rock and into a world without colour.Three dæmons with no human, one human with no dæmon: the journey begins.





	All The Parts And None Of The Whole

**Author's Note:**

> As per usual, take this with a sizeable grain of "I don't go here". I'm still very much learning the ropes RE: How To AU, and much like my last attempt this one is probably a bit upside-down. Apologies, as always.

**

Monkey stepped out of the rock and into a world without colour.

A world without light, a world without life, a world without soul.

A world without dæmons.

At first, somewhat naively, he assumed it was just the monk who freed him, the stammering little half-human with his shaved head and his strange, high-voiced way of speaking. Stupid, maybe, but what else was he supposed to think?

It wasn’t completely unheard of, even before his imprisonment. Rare, to be certain, and discomfiting, but not beyond imagining. They often turned to the religious orders, the ones with no dæmons, like they believed they could fill the void in their souls with faith and prayer and hope.

Monkey didn’t know if it worked. The Master, at least, had seemed more or less at peace with himself, content to make the most of the unlucky hand life had dealt him. Not always — perceptive as he was, Monkey had caught him in moments of loneliness and quiet melancholy, as though his chosen path and comfortable home weren’t always enough to chase away the emptiness — but most of the time. Often enough, at least, to make a convincing case.

But then, maybe that had more to do with their unique relationship than anything else. A human born with no dæmon, rare but not impossible, taking under his tutelage the only dæmon in the world born with no human. So far as either of them knew, Monkey was unique; with no others like him, souls without bodies, perhaps the Master felt the bond between them was all he needed to feel complete and connected. Not real, not true, not pure, but so close that they could imagine, on their best days, that they might be.

Perhaps that was enough for him, as it was for Monkey. Perhaps it wasn’t. Afraid to hear the answer, Monkey had never asked. And now, it seemed, he’d never get the chance.

He’d lived so much of his life that way, under the care of a man with no dæmon of his own, his colourless figure a quiet space in their otherwise bright and beautiful world, it was only natural to assume that the little monk who’d freed him was another like the Master, an empty body born with a hole where his soul should be, doing the best he could to bring some light into his life.

But it wasn’t just him. And it wasn’t just the rare, unlucky few.

It was _everyone_.

Walking through the streets of the lifeless town, his tail swishing moodily under the giant moth-eaten cloak the monk had shoved him into, Monkey could scarcely believe his eyes. Everywhere he looked, he saw shadows of empty souls, bodies like hollowed-out shells shuffling around, the walking dead drifting vacantly through the world. Like no-one had any idea there was something missing.

Like this was how things were supposed to be.

The monk explained it as best he could at the local tavern, staring sightlessly into a bowl of gruel: “The world has changed a lot.”

Monkey snorted his bemusement. “I can see that for myself, thanks.” Then, tugging irritably at the great unwieldly cloak, “Is this thing really necessary?”

The monk — _Tripitaka_ , Monkey reminded himself; the little human had a name, if not a soul — shrugged an insincere apology, then lowered his voice to a cautious hush. “Like I said, the world has changed. We can’t risk someone seeing your face.”

“Why not? It’s exceptionally handsome.”

“For a monkey dæmon, yes.” Said with a completely straight face, that, followed immediately by a flushing, awkward cough. A strange monk indeed, Monkey thought. “But dæmons can’t… they don’t exist any more. They haven’t existed in a very long time.”

“ _What_?”

Tripitaka turned his face away, discomfort washing over his fine, feminine features. He didn’t speak again for some time but Monkey could tell that his thoughts were not pleasant. He had a peculiar face for a monk, young but aged far beyond his years, as though wrought by some great personal tragedy. Difficult to say for sure, though, without his soul on display; Monkey was unaccustomed to reading the minds and moods of humans who had no dæmons to give their hearts away.

Only the Master, really. And that was—

Not something he wanted to think about.

“You became a pariah,” Tripitaka told him, the rough-edged whisper cutting through Monkey’s train of thought. “When word spread that you’d killed your human…”

“I didn’t—!”

Too loud, apparently; the outburst made Tripitaka jolt and lurch backwards, looking around himself like he expected someone to come at them right them and there. He recovered himself, still a little uneasy, and making hasty hushing gestures with his hands. “Could you at least _try_ to…”

“Right.” With some effort, Monkey reined in his anger, lowering his voice to a hiss for the monk’s sake. “He wasn’t _my_ human. And even if he was, I would never have killed him.”

The idea was stupid, of course, on every conceivable level. If there had been the least shred of truth to it — if the Master truly had been his human, if Monkey really had been the one to kill him — they would have died together, the way it always should be for humans and their dæmons. He wouldn’t have lived long enough to face his punishment, to be put on trial and judged by his former friends, locked away for all eternity in penance for someone else’s cruelty.

Not that he’d fought it especially hard, if he was honest. Bound for the rest of his life in a rock, alone, to atone for the death of the only human who truly cared for him; it seemed fitting. And besides, with the Master's life snuffed out — and with it, the closest thing to a human of his own, true or not — what reason did he have to stick around?

“I know,” Tripitaka said, hushed and squirrelly-nervous, like he was still worried others were eavesdropping. “There are… were… _are_ some who know the truth. Not many — most have forgotten, and the old resentments still burn hot among those who haven’t — but we do exist. And we’ve worked very hard to free you from your unjust punishment, to bring you back to the world. You’re needed, Monkey, now more than ever.”

That much was obvious. A world without dæmons, where the lifeless and soulless were everywhere, walking around like their existence wasn’t an abomination, a crime against nature… it was unfathomable. But what did the little monk expect him to do about it?

He’d always been unique, true, but there weren’t many who knew that, even before he got put in the rock. If more had known, or at least suspected, perhaps they wouldn’t have been so quick to assume that the Master was his, that he would have turned on his own body and cut it down like some sort of twisted madman. Easier, or so it seemed, to believe that impossibility — a dæmon killing his own human and surviving — than the plain and simple truth: that the Master had never been his, that Monkey was as bodiless as the Master was soulless, a dæmon born without a human.

Not that he could blame them, he supposed, for not factoring in that possibility; to all intents and purposes, it _wasn’t_ a possibility. A human body could exist well enough without its dæmon soul, just as it could exist without a limb or an eye, incomplete but mostly functional. But a soul with no body, a dæmon with no human? That was very, very different.

But then, that was Monkey. He had come into being, whole and complete and unconnected, born out of nothing, entirely alone, and that was as much as he knew. He had settled into his monkey form almost before he’d fully settled into his consciousness, and it came to him as naturally as breathing to study and mimic the behaviour of humans, walking upright, using his hands the way they did, acting like them in every way. As if the part of him that felt the absence of a human body was trying to twist itself into one.

The Master took him in not long after his earliest memories. He raised him, cared for him as if he really were his own dæmon, as if the two of them had found each other by some divine prophecy, two lonely, incomplete misfits with nothing to connect to. A bond forged by choice not birth, and one pure enough to convince almost everyone who met them that they truly were one.

Too well, it seemed, because when Monkey was found crouched over the Master’s body that fateful day, it was simply assumed without question: for the first time in history, a dæmon had risen up and murdered his own human, and lived to tell the tale.

“It started a revolution,” Tripitaka explained quietly, jolting him back to a present no less unpleasant than the past. “People started to believe that dæmons could harm their humans, even kill them, without suffering the same fate themselves. That made them a threat, made them dangerous. People started to shun their dæmons, to lock them up or mistreat them, seeking out ways to cut the connection completely. The whole world, the way we looked at it and at ourselves… it all changed. Suddenly, the few humans who had no dæmons of their own were the only ones who were safe. People no longer _wanted_ their dæmons, so…”

“…so they ceased to exist.”

Saying the words, he felt sick. Worse than sick; he felt almost as hollowed-out and empty as the soulless humans swarming like animals all around him, the half-dead creatures that dared to call themselves alive.

He wanted to say it was impossible. But then, wasn’t he living proof that impossible things could happen anyway? Hadn’t he always been that?

Tripitaka was nodding frantically. “We need you,” he said again. Still low, but it was a different kind of hush now, born of passion and reverence rather than the need to keep his voice down. “The Scholar… that is, the man who raised me, he told me that the soul is bleeding out of the world. We need you to help bring it back.”

“Me.” He kept his tone flat and dull, as much like the world around him as he could make it. “What am I supposed to do? A whole world full of soulless, lifeless humans. No light, no colour, no nothing. How do you expect one dæmon to change things?”

Tripitaka studied him for a long moment, in contemplative silence. The hood of the cloak cast shadows across Monkey’s field of vision, making it even harder to read his expression; he couldn’t really make out the nuance flickering behind the little human’s eyes, couldn’t fathom the depths without a dæmon to help, but he had a suspicion he was pondering something important, something big and maybe dangerous. He wasn’t sure how he knew, really, only that he did.

He wanted to reach out. Not to touch, of course — that would be obscene; he had never touched any human but the Master in his life, and he never would — but simply to to offer some measure of comfort, to reassure the little monk that he was safe. He didn’t really know how to go about it, though, or what he was supposed to do. He wasn’t used to communicating with unfamiliar humans directly, without their dæmons to act as go-betweens; it was as difficult, modulating his own behaviour, as it was making sense of the human’s.

Not that he needed to, it seemed. It took a couple of moments, but finally some of the tension bled out of Tripitaka’s slim, angular shoulders. He’d made a choice, Monkey could tell, and by making it some of his burden had been lifted. Good or bad, at least the decision had been made.

“Well,” he said at last, speaking carefully, “maybe not just _one_ dæmon.”

And for the first time since he got out of the stupid rock, Monkey thought he saw a glimmer of light.

*

The monk brought him to one of the farms on the edge of the village.

There were a few of them scattered about here and there, some big and some smaller; none of them seemed particularly interesting to Monkey, but he was already figuring out that it was best to just stay quiet and do what Tripitaka said, that he got more answers from obedience than asking questions.

The answer he got this time…

Well. ‘Surprising’ would be an understatement.

At first, he didn’t fully grasp what he was supposed to be looking at. A field of milling animals, cows and pigs and a couple of wayward sheep, each herded into their own pens, the usual boring farm stuff. Monkey had little knowledge of agriculture, and considerably less interest, but at a glance nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing that might explain the wide-eyed excitement lighting up Tripitaka’s face all of a sudden, the way he started bouncing on the balls of his feet as they approached, like a young boy who hadn’t yet learned to keep his feelings hidden beneath the surface.

Monkey frowned, rather more curious about the monk than their destination. He was about to open his mouth and ask what the big deal was when his keen eyes caught a glint of something that was definitely not sunlight.

It took his confused mind a moment or two to place it. That in itself was unforgivable; he’d only been in this cold new world a few hours and already the colourless void was becoming the new normal. It seemed he’d adjusted without even realising it. A deeply unpleasant thought, that, and he shoved it to the back of his mind, refocusing his attention on what mattered: _colour_ , the first glint of it he’d seen since coming out of the rock.

Colour, yes, and life.

He squinted, cocked his head to the side, almost standing on his head to make sure. But there it was, right in the middle of the field, surrounded by mindless, soulless beasts…

“Is that—?”

“A dæmon.” Tripitaka was beaming. His face was so bright, so exuberant, that for a moment or two he almost seemed to glow as well, his dark eyes catching and reflecting the dæmon’s colours. “Yeah, it is.”

Monkey didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything.

Another dæmon in this world where they were supposedly extinct, and with no sign of any humans nearby. She could be hiding somewhere, he supposed, startled or frightened by the intrusion, but he was sure he’d sense her presence if that was so. He could sense the dæmon more clearly now that he knew he was there; old and stocky, he had settled rather fittingly in the form of a giant pig, and he seemed to be entirely at home surrounded by real ones.

“This…” Monkey massaged his temples. “This makes no sense.”

He kept to himself the part where his disbelief was tainted by a touch of jealousy, of pre-emptive resentment. He had been the only one of his kind for all his life, the only dæmon to be born without a human body; _unique_ , he’d worn the word with pride, like a crown no-one else could ever wear. Struck now by the sight of another like him, a dæmon alone in the world, whole and complete, with no human anywhere in range… against his best efforts, it stung.

Tripitaka reached out instinctively, as if to touch his arm and offer comfort, then caught himself, realising what he was doing with a jolt of horror and lurched backwards like he’d been struck a blow.

Good, Monkey thought, a little uncomfortably; at least some of the old instincts were still alive and well. It may be strange and new, but at least he didn’t have to worry about unsolicited contact from humans who couldn’t understand what a terrible violation it was.

“I’ll let him explain,” Tripitaka said, when he recovered himself. “Wait here.”

So saying, and without waiting for acknowledgement he scampered off across the field, seeming to neither notice nor care that he was strolling through some hapless farmer’s property.

He returned a couple of minutes later with the pig dæmon in tow, both of them chattering animatedly amongst themselves. Going by the look on the dæmon’s face, stern and somewhat sober, Monkey wasn’t really sure he wanted to know what they were saying about him.

The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and arms as they drew close, and his nerves seemed to catch fire, itching and burning a little under his skin. It was an uncomfortable thing, seeing a dæmon with no human to call his own, and he briefly found himself wondering if others felt the same nameless unease around him, back in the world that was, if that was a part of why they were so keen to believe the Master was his. Easy to shake off the discomfort if you could pretend it wasn’t there; Monkey wondered if he would have assumed Tripitaka was this dæmon’s human too, seeing them walk together in the open, if he didn’t already know better.

Shaking him out of his discomfort, Tripitaka cleared his throat.

“This is Pigsy,” he announced, with an exaggerated sort of cheerfulness, a little forced and a little false. “Pigsy, this is—”

“I know who he is.”

His voice was as tense as his posture, as stern as his expression; he was no more pleased to see Monkey, it seemed, than Monkey was to see him. His size made him imposing, though, and Monkey took a few uneasy steps back. Hackles still up, he swallowed the instinct to growl, to stand his ground, to meet the dæmon’s dark look with one of his own.

“Where’s your human?” he demanded, a little more confident with some distance between them.

It probably wasn’t the most pressing question, all things considered. _Why are you here at all? How did you survive when the rest of our kind were rejected out of existence?_ They were the important things, the things he was sure Tripitaka would want him to ask. But he was confused and a little shell-shocked and his relief and no longer being the only dæmon in this empty future was clashing with his jealousy at the thought of no longer being unique; with so many questions to ask, he had to pick the one that straddled both.

Pigsy didn’t immediately answer. He was studying him, piercing him all the way down to his core, staring through his form, his body, in that familiar way that only dæmons could do with each other. Monkey stood there and let it happen, though he wasn’t really happy about it; he’d never been comfortable being scrutinised, and five centuries of imprisonment for a crime he hadn’t committed wasn’t making him appreciate it any more.

Still, he held himself still, gritted his teeth, and accepted the inspection. Courtesy was courtesy, after all, even if everything else in the world had changed beyond recognition.

Finally, apparently satisfied that he was worth talking to, Pigsy lifted his snout, and said in a numb, hollowed-out monotone, “She’s been dead for a long time.”

That was all, a single short sentence, said flatly and without emotion, but it told a hundred little stories all at once. Monkey had to take a moment to try and process them all.

One: they weren’t the same. Pigsy had been normal once, with a human of his own. He was alone now, as strange as that was, but he’d been born as all dæmons were born: as part of a whole. He wasn’t like Monkey, unique in his completeness; he was just another unnatural product of this unnatural world. It made Monkey relax in parts of him so deep he almost hadn’t known they were there.

Two: Pigsy’s human was _dead_. As far as Monkey knew, such a thing shouldn’t even be possible. Humans and dæmons were two parts of a single whole, a body and a soul; they might be able to exist in isolation if they were born that way — as he was, as the Master was, as all humans seemed to be these days — but if a human and a dæmon were born as one, so too would they die as one, together, connected in death as in life.

It was no less impossible now, hearing it from a lone, humanless pig dæmon than it was five hundred years ago, rolling his eyes at the accusations that he had somehow managed to kill his own human and survive.

“How?” he asked, when he found his voice again. “When? _How_?”

Those two ‘how’s were two very different questions. From the look on his porcine face, Pigsy understood them both perfectly well.

“A long time ago,” he said, still flat and hollow. “After you did what you did. After they put you away, after word started to spread, after…”

He stopped, sighing heavily. Tripitaka’s fingers twitched at his side, but he didn’t touch Pigsy any more than he had touched Monkey. “You don’t have to…”

“It’s fine.” He didn’t even glance at the monk as he spoke, though, continuing to address Monkey like the interruption had never happened. “She got distant. Stopped communicating, stopped touching me, stopped even looking at me. Happened to a lot of us after… well, _you_.” Danger flashed in his eyes, a hard gleam the colour of lightning, like aqua on copper. “By the time she died, there was nothing left of what had once kept us bonded.”

Monkey shook his head a few times, sympathetic and stunned at the same time. He wasn’t very good at the former, so he tried to stay focused on the latter. “So when she died, you just… didn’t?”

“Pretty much.” A tense shrug. “Always was stubborn.”

That had to be the biggest understatement ever. If what he was saying carried even half a grain of truth…

Monkey shook his head, whistling. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look particularly happy about it, though. “Suppose you could say it freed me. Surviving, I mean, when I should’ve died with her. Guess it was just the last bit of proof that there was nothing left of what made us whole, that _we_ had died long before _she_ did.” Shoulders slumping with wordless, nameless grief, he turned away. “Took a long time to really see it that way, though.”

It took a few moments for Monkey to absorb all that, to fully grasp what he was hearing. The idea that the bond between dæmon and human could decay so much, so completely and thoroughly, that there was nothing left to endure in death. Small wonder, he thought sadly, that dæmons had stopped manifesting at birth; who would, in a world where they were so unwanted?

“The world really did change,” he breathed, mostly to himself.

Pigsy’s eyes flashed again, a darker shade of lightning.

“Thanks to _you_.” He spat the word like a poison, like something indigestible; no mean feat coming from a dæmon in pig form. “There’s not enough of us left to fill a thimble.”

Standing cautiously between them, keeping a careful distance, Tripitaka cleared his throat. Pigsy turned, a little of his anger bleeding out as he faced the monk, then bowed his head as if in worship. Monkey turned as well, forcing himself to focus on what was important, but he stayed upright and did not bow. He’d never shown deference to a human in his life — not even the Master, not even in their most precious moments — and he was not about to start now. 

“I didn’t do anything,” he huffed, to the human more than the dæmon. “It’s not my fault if his human hated him.”

“You _killed_ your human!” Pigsy snarled, his massive body quivering with rage.

Monkey snarled too, fur sticking up all along his body, long simian fingers curling into humanesque fists at his sides.

“I don’t have a human,” he gritted out, teeth bared in a threat. “The Master was my friend and my mentor, but he was never my _human_. And even if he was, I wouldn’t have killed him. I liked him.”

Pigsy grunted his derision. “You really expect me to believe that? After five hundred years?”

“I don’t care if you believe it or not.” He spun on his heels, effortlessly graceful, and deliberate in the way he showed his back to the enormous, looming pig dæmon. Facing Tripitaka again, he muttered, with exaggerated bravado, “Are we done with this idiot?”

Tripitaka shook his head. “Pigsy’s going to help us,” he said, like the matter was already decided; the look on his face said he’d hoped this little meeting would go over rather better than it had. “Now that you’re back in the world, we can spread the truth. Show people that they’ve been believing a lie. Make them see that dæmons aren’t dangerous or destructive, that we need them.”

“Really?” He scoffed. “You’re going to use him to prove that dæmons are needed? That idiot there?” All feints at politeness having long since evaporated, he spread his arms to take in the farm. “He’s living like an _animal_.”

“Some of us don’t have a bloody choice,” Pigsy growled, sounding suddenly more haunted than angry. “We all do what we have to do to survive. Something _you_ wouldn’t understand.”

“If they realised what he was,” Tripitaka explained, sounding nearly as harrowed as Pigsy, “they’d probably have him slaughtered.”

Monkey snorted, amused and sort of sickened all at once. He could have made a few choice comments about that, but he held his tongue. Hard to feel guilty for what had happened in his name when he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but he’d been in this strange dæmonless world for almost no time at all and he already he couldn’t bear the thought of living out his existence here; if he’d been in Pigsy’s hooves, forced to live and live and live in a world that hated him, he had no idea what measures he might have resorted to.

Whatever he might think of the cowardly, selfish pig dæmon, he’d been forced to endure this world a for damn sight longer than Monkey had. He deserved a little respect for that. At the very least, he deserved a little bit of grudging patience.

“Fine,” Monkey grumbled at last. No doubt they could both tell it wasn’t what he really wanted to say, but with any luck he’d earn a few points for keeping his less flattering thoughts to himself. “Let him tag along, then, if he wants to. I’m sure he’ll be real useful.”

“At least he’s willing to try,” Tripitaka snapped, losing a bit of his effeminate gentleness. “He’s spent half his life thinking you’re the reason he’s alone and incomplete, and he’s still willing to work with you to do the right thing.” He glanced at Pigsy, hopeful and hopeless all at once. “Right?”

Pigsy sighed, an unpleasant snuffling sound, then shrugged his broad shoulders in a way that made him seem, just for a moment, almost human. Monkey, who had spent entirely too much of his life trying to emulate the human condition, felt a brief pang at the sight.

“Beats sticking around here,” Pigsy grunted. “Been too long since I got to actually be myself.”

In spite of himself, Monkey softened a little at that. Not completely, not enough to fully put his guard down around a dæmon who’d stayed alive when his human had not, but certainly more than he had thus far. He couldn’t imagine living in such a demeaning way, hiding in the fields and farms like a beast, hoping against hope that the colourless humans of this world wouldn’t recognise him for the living, breathing miracle he was.

He wondered, just a little morbidly, if perhaps there was a small part of Pigsy that wished that they would, that hoped someone would catch the spark of colour and light that gave away what he was, that wondered if it would almost be worth the death just to be known, for just a moment, for what he truly was.

“Must be rough,” he said, quieter now. “Probably lonely too.”

“It was,” Pigsy said, lowering his own voice a bit too. “I should’ve died a long time ago. Should’ve died with her. Found what peace there was with her even if we’d lost what little there still was of _us_. But here I am, watching the world twist and change, watching our kind get reviled and resented, feared and hated until there’s nothing left of us. It’s…” He looked Monkey right in the eye; his lightning-flash eyes made all the hairs on Monkey’s body stand on end. “Ah, why waste my breath? You’ll never understand.”

Monkey wasn’t so sure about that. If he stuck around in this nightmarish world for long enough, surrounded on all sides by humans too far gone to realise that a part of them was missing…

He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to understand, didn’t want to live that way. If the only choice for a dæmon in this world was being like Pigsy, living a lie and telling himself it was truth, he’d sooner go back into the rock and sleep forever. And he’d sooner roll over and die before he ever admitted that kind of defeat.

So, then…

“I guess we’ll just have to fix it,” he said, turning away from Pigsy’s neon eyes and clearing his throat. “At least, that’s what the monk says.”

“Smart monk,” Pigsy said, with an odd look on his face.

Tripitaka coughed, suddenly looking a little shy, like he was trying to cut off some unpleasant conversation topic. Monkey didn’t really get it, but he wasn’t about to argue; if it got them out of this damn field and into some action, he was all for the change of subject. Hells, he was all for pretty much anything.

“We’ll need to head west,” Tripitaka said. Slow and thoughtful, like he said most things, but with an air of preparedness that said he’d been sitting on this idea for a very long time. “The resistance has a base there. Resources, people… maybe dæmons too, I don’t know, but they should be able to help us. And it’s said…”

His eyes lit up as he spoke, seemingly lost in something deeply profound, so much so that his voice stuttered and trailed off. Monkey swished his tail, making his impatience clear. “Who said what?”

Tripitaka coughed again. “That is, uh…” He breathed in and out slowly, then pressed on. “There are rumours of texts. Mystical scrolls imbued with magic. They’re hidden all over the world, so it’s said, readable only by those who are whole, human and dæmon in perfect harmony. The Scholar believed these scrolls hold important secrets, magic spells to help the soulless find their other halves…”

Monkey snorted as the little human trailed off again, but the laughter lacked his usual derision.

He knew rather more about this than he’d care to admit to a soulless monk and a dæmon who refused to die. The Master, he recalled, spoke of such scrolls and text all the time, so often that in his darkest, most self-hating days Monkey wondered if he was thinking of going to seek them out himself, a way to obtain a dæmon of his own. A real dæmon, a true one, all his own. Not some cheap simian pretender who would never know what it meant to be truly connected.

Monkey never mentioned how much the idea upset him. How angry and helpless he felt sometimes, wondering if he wasn’t good enough. He wouldn’t let the weakness show, wouldn’t let slip that he cared that much, that he cared at all. Especially if it turned out that his hu— _Master_ did not.

And so he’d stayed silent. Let the Master talk about the stupid texts, the stupid scrolls, let him ramble on about where they might be hidden, how they might one day be found, what it might mean for the future of humans and dæmons both. He’d listened to every word in great detail, then rolled his eyes and turned his face away, and pretended he was only bored.

He shook his head, dragged himself back to the unpleasant present.

Tripitaka and Pigsy were both staring at him now, like they were reading some part of that in his face, or perhaps his mind; back in the world that was, dæmons could read each others’ thoughts easily enough, and their own humans’ as well. He didn’t really think Pigsy was capable of such deep thinking, but he couldn’t be too careful.

He crossed his arms, perfectly prepared to make them drag the truth of out him by force, when, seemingly of its own accord and without his consent, he heard his own voice blurt out:

“I might know a little about it.” 

Tripitaka’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly; Monkey couldn’t make out the look on his face, but it wasn’t surprise. “Oh?”

“Mm.” Monkey did not like his tone any more than his expression, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from continuing. “The Master was practically obsessed with them.”

He flushed hotly as soon as the words were out, coming back to himself and clamping his lips stubbornly together to keep any more from escaping. Stupid traitorous voice, letting out secrets they had no right to know. Like they’d somehow proven themselves—

“Yes.” Tripitaka was smiling now, serene and monkish and seeming for a moment as whole and complete as any true human Monkey had ever met. “I thought that might be the case.”

He did not elucidate, and the quiet secrecy made Monkey shudder a bit, hairs standing up on his neck and arms. “You’re a strange little human.”

Tripitaka chuckled. “So I’ve been told,” he said, and the smile grew softer and sort of sad.

Feeling more than a little uncomfortable by now, Monkey turned his eyes to the horizon. Easier to blind himself with sunlight than look any longer at the melancholy monk or the oversized dæmon with thunder in his eyes.

“So,” he said, shifting uneasily on his feet. “Should we, uh, get going or something? No time like the… uh, now.”

Poorly phrased, perhaps, but it broke up a little of the tension. For now, he would take it as a victory.

“No arguments here.” Pigsy made an amicable grunt-like noise, then glanced around at the other animals with a touch of fond nostalgia. “Though it’ll be a shame to leave these fellas behind. Kind of felt a bit like family, you know? They always knew what I was, even after all the humans forgot how to see, but they never much cared. So long as I did right by them, that was enough.” He sighed a little sadly, then went on, as if trying to convince himself, “For the best, though, yeah?”

Monkey clapped a hand onto his massive, hardy shoulder. Easy to offer tactile comfort to another dæmon, even if they weren’t exactly on friendly terms. After the discomfort of navigating communication with a dæmonless human, it was oddly comforting.

“For the best,” he echoed, swallowing down the apology that wanted to creep, unbidden and undeserved, out of his throat. Turning swiftly back to Tripitaka, he pressed, “Lead on, little monk.”

Tripitaka smiled warmly at them, then grew suddenly sober.

“Soon,” he said. “But we have one more stop to make first.”

*

One more stop, he said.

Apparently, in this exotic new world of dæmonless humans and colourless half-light, that meant a scenic trawl through the town’s sewer system. Because of course it did.

Monkey was not impressed, but he knew better than to try and argue.

Pigsy cleverly volunteered to stay above ground and keep an eye out for any wayward, nosy humans who might have taken an interest in their peculiar procession. Monkey envied his quick thinking, but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of saying so. He’d been stuck in a rock for five hundred years, sleeping soundly as the world transformed into madness around him; if he could endure that without complaint, he could surely endure a few minutes in the dark.

And the dank.

And the dirt.

And the decay.

And—

“This had better be important,” he grumbled sourly. “My feet are getting wet, and I _hate_ wet feet.”

“It is important,” Tripitaka said, without looking back. “I promise.”

So saying, he picked up the pace and refused to say anything more.

Monkey knew better than to press a lost cause, and so he gave up. He’d get his answers soon enough, after all, and then it wouldn’t matter what Tripitaka would or wouldn’t tell him.

It happened sooner than he expected.

They turned a corner, Monkey’s keen eyes piercing the blackness for any signs of something worthwhile, and all of a sudden there it was: a glint in the dark, a flash of something too quick to catch, a sort of shimmering in the shadows, like the keen edge of scales or teeth, and a growl, low and rough, like a whine made ragged with hunger.

Monkey didn’t stop to assess the situation. Didn’t think, didn’t pause, didn’t hesitate; he had learned too many times the dangers of waiting too long, of giving his enemies the advantage. Hesitation had landed him in this predicament in the first place, and it had cost the Master his life. He would never let it happen again.

He lunged, throwing himself into the shadows, lashing out half-blindly at at the flash of jagged teeth, of scales and claws, guided by the guttural noises. Unfettered but completely controlled, a blur of fists and feet and ferocity, a monkey’s strength and human discipline, he was unstoppable.

A snarl from the darkness, as his fists made contact, once and then again. A hiss, the slithering shift of movement between the shafts of light, and then—

White, almost dazzling in the dank black of the sewers. An alligator, or something that looked a lot like one, scaled and scrawled with scars and slinking through the dark like it was born there. Claws raking, jaws snapping, it came at him like it was possessed, like a wounded animal or a beast defending its territory; Monkey leaped out of the way of a swiping claw, ducked and dove over and under the sharp teeth, and threw a glare over his shoulder at Tripitaka.

“If you’d told me we’d come down here for pest control…”

“We didn’t!” The monk looked nearly as pale as the monster, though Monkey supposed that could have been the lack of light. “Monkey, stop!”

Monkey laughed, spinning on his heels to lunge at the thing again. “Don’t worry, little monk! I’ll handle this abomination for you!”

A flurry of punches did little good, though, against the creature’s thick hide, and so he improvised. Ducking again under its slavering jaws, he fumbled in the muck and grime for a weapon. Something sharp enough to make a dent in those armoured scales, jagged enough to give him an advantage when it found purchase, something, anything—

Tripitaka was still yelling at him to stop, full with the stupid sentimental squeamishness so typical of monks and holy men, “don’t!” and “please!” and “you don’t know what you’re doing!”, but Monkey blocked him out; he’d never met a monk who knew what was good for him anyway. Simian fingers wrapping around a shard of glass in the dirt, he launched himself up again, swinging hard, driving the thing deep into that thick pale hide.

The creature cried out, a howl of pain and fear that sounded almost human. It shook the walls, leaving the body exposed, and Monkey laughed again, sensing an easy victory.

“Not so tough now, are you?” he crowed, yanking the shard out and raising it up to drive in again, harder and faster and more deadly, readying to end this nonsense now, before—

“No!”

Tripitaka again. Not content to simply shout this time, he threw himself between their bodies, crying out in a panic. It happened so quickly, if his reflexes had been just a little less great, Monkey would have brought the thing down on him instead, and that would have been the end of their mission.

“Are you serious?” he blurted out, stopping himself with an immense force of will. “Get out of my way so I can finish—”

“Monkey, _no_.” His voice was shaking — whether from exertion or fear, or something else entirely, Monkey couldn’t tell — but his body was not; he looked Monkey right in the eye, and did not flinch at all. “You don’t understand.”

Monkey scoffed. “It’s not exactly complicated. That monster—”

“She’s not a monster!” The word was practically a sob. “She’s a _dæmon_.”

Monkey dropped his makeshift weapon.

A thousand feelings rolled over him all at once, like an ocean or a flash-fire. Confusion, disbelief, nausea, and a wave of horror so profound it drowned out all the others completely.

“That’s impossible,” he managed, sounding exactly as shell-shocked as he felt. “Dæmons can recognise other dæmons on sight. I’d know if that thing was a…”

But he couldn’t even say the word, sickened all the way down to his soul by even just the idea that he might have raised a hand against one of his own without even realising it.

 _Impossible_ , he tried to say again, but the word would not come.

“Stay back,” Tripitaka told him, upset and creeping towards anger.

Monkey wasn’t usually one to obey orders from humans, or from anyone, but the look on Tripitaka’s face said that he was perfectly willing to shove him back by force — to actually _touch_ him — if he didn’t back off on his own, and even Monkey would sooner bow and obey than allow a human to touch him. Some things were more sacred than pride. Some things were more sacred than anything.

Except…

Apparently, the creature — if indeed it really was a dæmon — had a very different opinion. It had slunk into a dark corner, whining and hissing its pain, and there it huddled as Tripitaka approached. The monk moved slowly, carefully, with the kind of quiet patience that said this wasn’t his first time down here. He kept his voice low and soft, murmuring gentle placations as if the wretched thing could understand him, and when he drew close enough he reached out without hesitation to touch its shoulder, the bloody tear where Monkey’s makeshift weapon had made its mark.

A horrible, hellish thing for a human to do, to reach out and try to touch a dæmon in pain. And yet…

And yet, instead of rearing back as any self-respecting dæmon would, the creature made a low whimpering noise, almost like affection, and leaned into the monk’s touch as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

As if it was—

As if _they_ were—

“Wait,” Monkey heard himself splutter, growing more horrified by the moment. “Is that thing _yours_?”

Tripitaka didn’t even spare him a glance. “No.” He kept his voice soft and soothing, kept his hands moving across the creature’s tough, bloody hide. “She’s not mine. She just trusts me.”

“That’s ridiculous. I mean, that’s…” He shook his head, disbelief finally overpowering his discomfort, and finally found the word that had eluded him before: “ _Impossible_.”

Tripitaka continued to ignore him. Locking eyes with the unnatural dæmon-monster-thing, he stroked its hide a couple more times, gentler and gentler as it grew still, then whispered, like a secret, “It’s okay. Show him.”

Monkey snorted his derision, rolling his eyes. This was a waste of both their time, and he was getting more and more annoyed by the amount of energy the monk was spending on it.

“Really?” he muttered irritably. “What could that thing possibly show me?”

The creature made another rumbling sound, somewhere between a growl and a whine, then reluctantly pulled away from Tripitaka and slithered further into the shadows. It blinked up at Monkey, its eyes unsettlingly pale in the darkness, like it was trying to figure out whether he was still a threat, whether he would try and hurt it again for what it was about to do. 

Monkey sighed, spread his arms wide to show that he was no longer armed. The creature cocked its head for a moment, as though nodding, and then—

And _then_ —

Monkey’s jaw hit the floor.

An aurora of living colour flashed like a sunburst behind his eyes, and then the alligator was gone, the creature shifting effortlessly into a small, lithe otter. Another flash, less than a second later, and it became a sea-snake, then a frog, a vole, a water beetle. On and on, it went through maybe a dozen transformations, as easy and natural as any pre-pubescent dæmon, before settling at last as a greyish-black sewer rat, huddling in its corner and licking at its wounds.

“Seven hells,” Monkey heard himself choke, staring wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “It _is_ a dæmon.”

Tripitaka was beaming like a proud parent. “Her name is Sandy.”

Perhaps as a side-effect of all the form-switching, Monkey could see it more clearly now, the familiar glow of colour and light unique to dæmons; when he looked closely at the creature now, it was suddenly as obvious as it was back on the farm, the way it had been second nature to recognise an oversized, puffed-up pig dæmon in a field full of genuine livestock.

“Where’s your human?” he asked, with another half-glance at Tripitaka, still halfway expecting the monk to claim ownership of the thing after all. “And why haven’t you settled yet? You don’t look that young to me.”

The dæmon — Sandy, apparently; at least it had a name, if not its wits or any sense of etiquette — looked up at Tripitaka with a hopeful, distressed look on its face, whiskers twitching, eyes wide. Tripitaka nodded a couple of times, as though communicating with the thing on some level Monkey couldn’t grasp, then turned back to him with an apologetic shrug.

“She doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“Right.” He willed himself to soften a little, and tried to catch the wretched creature’s eye. “You can say it to me, you know. I promise I won’t stab you again.”

Sandy twitched, a full-body shudder like a flinch. Tripitaka scooped her up with his bare hands — Monkey sucked in his breath, still viscerally discomfited by the sight of the contact — and tucked her gently into his scarf, hiding her freakishness safely out of sight.

“She doesn’t know how,” he explained to Monkey, a little more patient with him now that the situation was under control. “She’s never met another dæmon before.”

“She… what?”

But even as he said it, he realised that it made a sad sort of sense. If there was any truth to what he’d heard about this new world and its sordid genesis, he supposed it stood to reason that there would be a few dæmons still being born out there, by accident or some cruel twist of fate or faith. Struggling little fractures of souls brought unwittingly to life in a world with none, no way of knowing what they were or how they’d come into being.

Probably a handful of confused humans, too, now that he thought of it, born with their souls in their hands, not understanding what it was or why it felt so precious.

He shuddered, then asked again, “What about her human?”

“She doesn’t have a human, Monkey. You can see that.”

The patience was starting to fray a little, for both of them. Monkey clenched his teeth, viscerally affected by the thought that that _thing_ might have been born like him.

“She must’ve had one at some point,” he pressed, willing his voice not to rise. “Even if he died like Pigsy’s, she must have had one. Right?”

Tripitaka shrugged. “I’m sure she did,” he said, a little too carelessly for Monkey’s taste. “But he’s not here now. And whatever happened to him, they can’t have been connected for very long. If she never got to settle, never even learned how to communicate…” He shook his head, looking upset. “I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to talk about it. She might not even remember.”

That wasn’t exactly enlightening, but it set Monkey’s mind a bit at ease. At least she’d had one once, or so Tripitaka believed, even if he hadn’t survived long. At least she’d come into the world normally, even if that was the only normal thing he could say about her. At least she wasn’t like _him_ ; at least he was still the only one in the world who was.

It shouldn’t have mattered. He knew that. He was in a new world now, and one with very different rules; the tiny handful of dæmons who existed were so strange and so unnatural that they might as well be a whole new species, cracked little half-souls like the colourless half-humans, all walking around in a dreary, disconnected daze. It didn’t mean anything any more, that he had been born whole, that he was unique. He had a new purpose now: to clear his name and avenge his Master’s death as he hadn’t been able to back then. Why did he care if he was still unique in this world where uniqueness meant death?

He didn’t know. But whatever the reason, stupid or not, he did care. And all the overthinking in the world wasn’t going make it stop.

“All right,” he muttered, after a long beat. “So now there’s three of us. Or two and a half, I guess.” He shrugged. “Any more weird maybe-dæmons you want to show me?”

“Not yet,” Tripitaka said, very softly; in the greyish half-light of the sewer, his eyes seemed to glimmer. “But if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll pick up a few more on the journey.”

From what Monkey had seen of this brave new world and its humans, he rather doubted it.

But he had just enough compassion in him not to say so out loud.

*

They reunited with Pigsy just beyond the village gates.

He was a little curious about their newest addition, but not as surprised as Monkey had been. Her inability to settle into a single form didn’t seem to bother him, and neither did her inability to speak. All this he took in stride, seemingly content just to have another dæmon around; he asked a couple of questions through Tripitaka, shrugged when he got the same cryptic nonsense as Monkey — “she doesn’t want to talk about it” — then contented himself to sniffing about in the dirt like a real pig.

However well Tripitaka had thought out this stupid plan of his, Monkey thought, with this as their company, it was doomed before it even started.

“We head west,” Tripitaka told them, in an important, authoritative sort of voice. “Find as many of the sacred texts as we can—” This, he said with a pointed look at Monkey, like he really believed he could summon the texts out of thin air just because he’d listened to the Master rambling on about them. “—and rendezvous with the resistance at its base. The Scholar said that they would have a plan, that we would only need to…”

His voice broke, growing even more feminine then usual, and then he trailed off, shaking his head and blinking back tears. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that his precious Scholar was no longer around.

Shifting uncomfortably under his heavy, face-concealing cloak, Monkey felt his heart kicking behind his ribs. He wished he was better at offering comfort to humans, at expressing feeling at all. The Master had so rarely indulged in such things, and all the other humans he’d met had dæmons of their own, dæmons he could communicate with and touch and express himself through and with them. He didn’t know how to show sympathy or compassion to a human he couldn’t touch, didn’t know how to share deeper feelings with someone when he couldn’t see the colours of their soul.

Blessedly, he wasn’t the only one feeling adrift. Pigsy was shuffling his cloven feet, making sympathetic grunting sounds but otherwise keeping an awkwardly respectful distance, while Sandy, still nestled in the monk’s scarf, was blinking up at him like she was trying without success to understand what was going on.

Neither of them seemed inclined, or able, to say anything, so Monkey took a deep breath and made the effort himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, folding his hands in front of him like he’d seen the old-world monks do when praying or offering guidance. “Whatever happened to him, I’m sure it was…”

“…for the greater good,” Tripitaka finished quietly. “Yes. I’m sure he thought it was. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m here and he’s not. That I’m doing this when others should be in my place, that I’m wearing someone else’s—”

He cut himself off, as though afraid of letting slip some terrible secret, then bowed his head and did not look up until he was certain his three companions would let the matter drop.

Getting the message loud and clear, and with no small measure of relief, Monkey nodded and cleared his throat.

“So,” he said, feeling strangely nervous. “To the west?”

Tripitaka raised his head, slipping off his sorrow like a shroud, and turned his dark eyes towards the horizon.

“Yes,” he breathed, reverent and prayerful. “To the west.”

**


End file.
